CES Reporter’s Notebook: The baby steps and the Olympian leaps

There were several important themes at this year’s International CES, all fully predictable.

There were more tablets than a single person could possibly survey — and far more than the market will support. Super phones, juiced up on fast processors and next generation networks, finally made their premier. And you couldn’t swivel your head without catching sight of a new 3D or Internet TV.

But the unifying theme of the show, from this reporter’s perspective, was incremental progress. This wasn’t the year for groundbreaking technologies, for those products that trigger deep consumer cravings for things we never knew we were missing (see “Apple” for examples) or for ingenious new solutions to long vexing problems.

As I spent hours walking the floors of the Las Vegas Convention Center and nearby hotels, and hours more sitting in glitzy, bass-heavy press conferences, I kept waiting for that lightning bolt. It didn’t come.

But then, it rarely does — and is often only recognized in retrospect. In recent memory there’s the critical trio of iWhatevers introduced by Apple. There’s the Google search engine. There’s Facebook and Twitter.

The long history of technology is one of tiptoe-like progress, typically blurred behind the chaos of competing visions and standards and price points. Only occasionally does it gather up its momentum into an Olympian leap forward.

And so, I reminded myself that the incremental does matter. Indeed, it’s the whole game. Here then, were the strides forward that caught my eye, the baby steps that could pick up speed.

I finally got to see a quick demo of the Motorola Atrix on Friday and it was just as impressive up close. It’s a dual-core smart phone featuring nearly 2 gigahertz of computing power, and running on AT&T’s recently completed HSPA+ network. But the most impressive feature is the ability to fit into docks that effectively convert it into a desktop or laptop, enabling its use with a full screen, keyboard and mouse.

The so called “Webtop” software enables easy multitasking in this mode and includes a shortcut bar and a full, desktop version of Firefox, with tabs and other standard features.

The companies haven’t revealed pricing or availability dates.

“Soon,” was as specific an answer as I could get.

This could be a gimme for my next phone, depending on how fast and reliable the upgraded network proves to be.

Motorola also unveiled the Xoom, its tablet running on Google’s forthcoming Honeycomb software, which is optimized for the platform. It may well be the first slate to fight in the iPad’s weight class.

But it’s hard to make that conclusion firmly yet. Google still isn’t allowing hands on demonstrations of the software, limiting journalists to the flashy videos that have been released and quick on stage peeks.

The Japanese company, which I admit to not following closely before, offered me a series of pleasant surprises in a fairly quick booth tour.

The company was showing prototypes of tablet and smart phone-sized devices running glasses-free 3D video. I should stress that they’re not actually tablets and smart phones — for now, it’s just the 3D technology packed into similar-looking cases — but a spokeswoman said that’s the direction the company is heading.

The company was also demonstrating smart phone-sized 3D cameras, using two adjacent cameras on one device to capture the slight differences in perspective used for its 3D technology. The gadgets were taking and displaying video live at the show.

Finally, Sharp showed off how its Galapagos service (which will have a different name when it launches in the United States) allows you to seamlessly move streaming video from its e-reader, to its television, to its smart phone, all by swiping in the direction of the device in question.

They demonstrated a shopping application of this technology that allows you to browse a fashion catalog on your e-reader, then swipe it to the television to watch a model moving about in the outfit.

LG Electronics’ OLED TVs are 2.9 millimeters thick, or rather I should say 2.9 millimeters thin. They were simply stunningly narrow, while still providing beautifully rich images.

SPOT

Devices that could be controlled or monitored via smart phones was a frequent topic at the show, from grill thermometers to washing machines to refrigerators.

SPOT, a company that provides satellite GPS devices that allow back country hikers and other adventurous types to send distress signals from remote areas, took up the theme as well.

Instead of being restricted to distress buttons on the product itself — which is about the size of a small walkie-talkie — the new even tinier Spot Connect is controlled by an iPhone or Android-device via Bluetooth.

Moving the user interface to these other devices allows users to send texts or Tweets or Facebook updates over satellite, in addition to distress signals, even when no cell phone signal is available.